The city announced this week that it has hired a new chief urban planner: Jennifer Keesmaat, a principal at a private design ﬁrm called Dialog. Her new job gives her extraordinary inﬂuence over the way Toronto grows and changes. It’s too early to say exactly what she’ll do in the role, but here are some urban-planning solutions from other cities that she considers to be among her favourites.

Copenhagen’s bike culture
Copenhagen enjoys a reputation among cyclists as a kind of paradise. The stories are true: By last count, in 2010, about 35% of all trips to work or education there happened on bicycles. What impresses Keesmaat is that cycling’s popularity in Copenhagen is not accidental. “There was a plan,” she says. “It was about thinking very carefully and strategically about how they could transform how people move about in the city, and as a result of that plan, Copenhagen has a new problem today, which is congestion in its bike lanes.”

New York City’s bold pilot projects
In 2009, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that portions of Broadway would be closed to auto traffic and turned into pedestrian zones, but only temporarily. Officials would study the results, and then decide whether to make the change permanent. The following year, they did. This is only one of several recent examples of dramatic New York pilot projects. “What’s so interesting about it is that it’s an approach that was developed in recognition that often in trying to get things done you get stuck in a lot of red tape,” Keesmaat says. But her enthusiasm for experimentation has limits. As she puts it: “The risk or the counterpoint to pilot projects is that they cannot be an excuse for not investing in long-term infrastructure.”

Chicago’s multi-use park
Chicago’s Millennium Park is a lot more than just a patch of grass: It has a bandshell, an ice rink, a restaurant, and, of course, that giant mirrored bean. “What I really like about Millennium Park is this notion that park spaces are diverse spaces where there’s a whole bunch of interesting things going on,” Keesmaat says, “as opposed to a huge swath of land where you can either picnic or throw a baseball.”

But Toronto’s still good
“There’s a lot of great planning and design that is underway in Toronto,” Keesmaat adds. “In many ways we’re developing a lot of best practices, and we’re kind of lousy at talking about them.”